These are some interesting images from artist Marcos Minuchin's Flickr set titled "Recession Army."

Interestingly, many have speculated that Lucas' Star Wars series had anti-capitalistunderpinnings. Lucas himself has cited the Vietnam war as a source of inspiration:

"Having grown up in
the shadow of the Vietnam War the issue of a primitive society
confronting a technologically advanced society has fascinated me
because that was the main event that was going on…during my college
years and the fact that human determination and human spirit could
overcome these vastly superior armies actually I found to be rather
inspiring as a human being. I think that is one of the main themes that
has gone through all of the Star Wars films."

I am not aware of Marcos Minuchin's political views, but his images certainly resonate with my own anti-imperialist, ecosocialist orientation. The satirical images question the notion of infinite progress, benign technology and mastery of the universe which accompanied capitalist culture throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s.

I believe many of us are trading the promise of the technology, growth and expansion for a greater orientation toward the earth, limits and sustainability. Moreover, we are questioning whether an economic system like capitalism is good for people and planet or better resigned as a system that inspired star wars - both imagined and real.

May the force be with us as we weather this recession and, more importantly, as we fight for a fairer distribution of wealth and input regarding the order of our economic and political systems.

Here is an interesting clip from a film called 'MYTHS FOR PROFITS' which
explores 'Canada’s role in Industries of War and Peace’. Through
diverse interviews and case studies this documentary unveils the
specific interests and profits that are made by certain corporation,
individuals and agency within Canada. The Canadian government and the
military would like us to believe that we are altruistic peacekeepers
helping people around the world. But is this accurate? 'MYTHS FOR
PROFIT' examines how these misconception are maintained and who stands
to gain by perpetuating them. By understanding the systems of power in
Canada we can move forward in challenging how they operate and
collectively create change.

The higher I climb the educational ladder, the more it hits me that I have to look outside the classroom - indeed, outside of academia - for the answers.

Howard Zinn shares his own process of conscientization in an essay titled 'Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire'. Read the essay or enjoy the video clip below narrated by Viggo Mortensen and illustrated by Mike Konopacki.

With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporatebullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.

However the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts about the purity of the "Good War," even after being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American "Empire."

I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When, after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took courses in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts called "The Age of Imperialism." It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view of U.S. expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire -- or period -- of "imperialism."

I recall the classroom map (labeled "Western Expansion") which presented the march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That huge acquisition of land called "The Louisiana Purchase" hinted at nothing but vacant land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had been occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be annihilated or forced from their homes -- what we now call "ethnic cleansing" -- so that whites could settle the land, and later railroads could crisscross it, presaging "civilization" and its brutal discontents.

Neither the discussions of "Jacksonian democracy" in history courses, nor the popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson, told me about the "Trail of Tears," the deadly forced march of "the five civilized tribes" westward from Georgia and Alabama across the Mississippi, leaving 4,000 dead in their wake. No treatment of the Civil War mentioned the Sand Creek massacre of hundreds of Indian villagers in Colorado just as "emancipation" was proclaimed for black people by Lincoln's administration.

That classroom map also had a section to the south and west labeled "Mexican Cession." This was a handy euphemism for the aggressive war against Mexico in 1846 in which the United States seized half of that country's land, giving us California and the great Southwest. The term "Manifest Destiny," used at that time, soon of course became more universal. On the eve of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Washington Post saw beyond Cuba: "We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle."

The violent march across the continent, and even the invasion of Cuba, appeared to be within a natural sphere of U.S. interest. After all, hadn't the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere to be under our protection? But with hardly a pause after Cuba came the invasion of the Philippines, halfway around the world. The word "imperialism" now seemed a fitting one for U.S. actions. Indeed, that long, cruel war -- treated quickly and superficially in the history books -- gave rise to an Anti-Imperialist League, in which William James and Mark Twain were leading figures. But this was not something I learned in university either.

The "Sole Superpower" Comes into View

Reading outside the classroom, however, I began to fit the pieces of history into a larger mosaic. What at first had seemed like a purely passive foreign policy in the decade leading up to the First World War now appeared as a succession of violent interventions: the seizure of the Panama Canal zone from Colombia, a naval bombardment of the Mexican coast, the dispatch of the Marines to almost every country in Central America, occupying armies sent to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As the much-decorated General Smedley Butler, who participated in many of those interventions, wrote later: "I was an errand boy for Wall Street."

At the very time I was learning this history -- the years after World War II -- the United States was becoming not just another imperial power, but the world's leading superpower. Determined to maintain and expand its monopoly on nuclear weapons, it was taking over remote islands in the Pacific, forcing the inhabitants to leave, and turning the islands into deadly playgrounds for more atomic tests.

In his memoir, No Place to Hide, Dr. David Bradley, who monitored radiation in those tests, described what was left behind as the testing teams went home: "[R]adioactivity, contamination, the wrecked island of Bikini and its sad-eyed patient exiles." The tests in the Pacific were followed, over the years, by more tests in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, more than a thousand tests in all.

When the war in Korea began in 1950, I was still studying history as a graduate student at Columbia University. Nothing in my classes prepared me to understand American policy in Asia. But I was reading I. F. Stone's Weekly. Stone was among the very few journalists who questioned the official justification for sending an army to Korea. It seemed clear to me then that it was not the invasion of South Korea by the North that prompted U.S. intervention, but the desire of the United States to have a firm foothold on the continent of Asia, especially now that the Communists were in power in China.

Years later, as the covert intervention in Vietnam grew into a massive and brutal military operation, the imperial designs of the United States became yet clearer to me. In 1967, I wrote a little book called Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. By that time I was heavily involved in the movement against the war.

When I read the hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers entrusted to me by Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the National Security Council. Explaining the U.S. interest in Southeast Asia, they spoke bluntly of the country's motives as a quest for "tin, rubber, oil."

Neither the desertions of soldiers in the Mexican War, nor the draft riots of the Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of the century, nor the strong opposition to World War I -- indeed no antiwar movement in the history of the nation reached the scale of the opposition to the war in Vietnam. At least part of that opposition rested on an understanding that more than Vietnam was at stake, that the brutal war in that tiny country was part of a grander imperial design.

Various interventions following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam seemed to reflect the desperate need of the still-reigning superpower -- even after the fall of its powerful rival, the Soviet Union -- to establish its dominance everywhere. Hence the invasion of Grenada in 1982, the bombing assault on Panama in 1989, the first Gulf war of 1991. Was George Bush Sr. heartsick over Saddam Hussein's seizure of Kuwait, or was he using that event as an opportunity to move U.S. power firmly into the coveted oil region of the Middle East? Given the history of the United States, given its obsession with Middle Eastern oil dating from Franklin Roosevelt's 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, and the CIA's overthrow of the democratic Mossadeq government in Iran in 1953, it is not hard to decide that question.

Justifying Empire

The ruthless attacks of September 11th (as the official 9/11 Commission acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of U.S. expansion in the Middle East and elsewhere. Even before that event, the Defense Department acknowledged, according to Chalmers Johnson's book The Sorrows of Empire, the existence of more than 700 American military bases outside of the United States.

Since that date, with the initiation of a "war on terrorism," many more bases have been established or expanded: in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, the desert of Qatar, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else a compliant nation could be bribed or coerced.

When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew -- what we had in common was that we both read books -- that he considered this "an imperialist war." Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.

In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism, and racism.

The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the coming of "The American Century." The time had arrived, he said, for the United States "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit."

We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration of imperial design. It has been echoed in recent years by the intellectual handmaidens of the Bush administration, but with assurances that the motive of this "influence" is benign, that the "purposes" -- whether in Luce's formulation or more recent ones -- are noble, that this is an "imperialism lite." As George Bush said in his second inaugural address: "Spreading liberty around the world… is the calling of our time." The New York Times called that speech "striking for its idealism."

The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project -- Democrats and Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it. President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the year he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used "her navy and her army... as the instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression." And Bill Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: "The values you learned here… will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the world."

For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric, often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that can no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of American GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes -- in the Middle East and in the Mississippi Delta.

Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting our good sense -- that war is necessary for security, that expansion is fundamental to civilization -- begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?

I have played various online games - MMORPGs - from the quaint Runescape to the profit-driven World of Warcraft. While I was aware that people sold high-level characters on EBay, I have just learned about "gold farmers" via We Make Money Not Art.

While the world is replete with examples of the wasteful nature of capitalism, the phenomenon of "gold farmers" must be one of the clearest illustrations of the theatre of the absurd we now find ourselves in as a result of our autistic economic system.

Imagine a world where cheap labour is used to produce virtual currency to sell for real dollars to consumers in the West for virtual accumulation and consumption...

Ge Jin, a 30-year-old Shanghai native and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, San Diego, has shot Gold Farmers, a documentary that delves into the background and lives of Chinese gold farmers. As the Gold Farmers' website explains:

Multiplayer online games have given rise to a virtual economy, in which all kinds of virtual assets from in-game currency, magic shield to whole characters are traded against real world currency. In China, there are tens of thousands of gaming sweatshops that hire people to play games like World of Warcraft and Lineage. The gaming workers kill monsters and loot treasures for 10-12 hours a day to produce virtual assets that are exported all over the world. They are called Chinese gold farmers by western gamers and many myths about them are circulated in the game universe.
This documentary leads you into several different Chinese gold farms. Who opened those gold farms? How did this industry emerge? What international connections do the gold farm owners have? How do they manage the virtual transactions? Who are these gaming workers? What is it like to play games for a living? Why don't they do something else? You will hear several gold farmers tell their own stories and see their everyday struggles to live at the border of the virtual and the real.
...Tietou went from Shanghai to Amherst College in the US to study computer engineering in 1999. However, he felt very alienated in the US and spent most of his days playing online games in his dorm, often trading virtual assets on Ebay. One day in 2002 he suddenly realized that he could use cheap Chinese labor to produce virtual assets, so he quit college and came back to China to establish gold farms. Although he was very successful at the beginning, now his gold farms have collapsed because of the fierce competition in this business...

As the stories evolve, you will also hear diverse views on this mysterious and controversial business. In China, we interview families of some gold farmers, government officials, a Chinese female gamers' club, doctors of game addiction etc. In the US, we interview gold brokers, game designers, activist gamers who established the NO Gold organization, and gamers who bought virtual assets etc. Particularly, we present why gold farming is so controversial amongst gamers. While some gamers happily buy gold as a way to enhance their virtual experience, some gamers are strongly against it. They think that the game world should be a level playing field, that it should be a magical circle free of the corruption of the real world. The game companies’ response has been ambivalent; some outlaw it but some incorporate it. We interview economists, law scholars and social scientists who debate over the social implications of gold farming. How big will this virtual economy become? Who owns the virtual properties in the game worlds? What will IRS say about your income from virtual trades? Can we tell the virtual from the real after all? How do we distinguish work from play? In the end, this film is not about massive online games, but about life in our global village. The virtual interaction makes the world smaller, but does it bring us closer?

Our economic system has literally led us to chase fool's gold. And, while we level up in response to a form of identity-marketing not even No-Logo-Klein could have imagined, the real world - the real economy, our real resources, our real incomes - are crumbling around us.

I watched a disturbing film last night called The Future of Food that discussed genetically engineered food and the criminal practices of companies like Monsanto.

Canadians, in particular, will be interested in the case of Percy Schmeiser. Monsanto's genetically modified Roundup Ready Canola plants
were found in Percy Schmeiser's field after unintential pollination of his field (likely from a seed-carrying truck driving by the field). Monsanto sued Schmeiser for patent infringement. Ultimately, a Supreme Court
5-4 ruling found in favor of Monsanto.

Monsanto through the U.S. government, is trying desperately to
reverse its failing fortunes by creating markets for its genetically
engineered crops (GMOs) through coercion and corruption.

The E.U. has not yet cleared GM crops for commercial planting or GM
food for imports. Brazil has had a ban on GM crops. And India has not
cleared GM food crops and has stopped the spread of genetically
engineered Bt. Cotton to Northern India after its dismal performance in
Southern India in the first season of commercial planting in 2002.

E.U., Brazil and India are all under attack overtly and covertly, for
not rushing into adopting genetically engineered crops without caution
and ensuring biosafety.

The U.S. has threatened to initiate a dispute against the E.U. in the
W.T.O. for not importing genetically modified foods. The U.S. trade
representative, Mr. Zoellick was in Brazil at the end of May to force
Brazil to remove the ban on GM crops. The U.S. Secretary of State tried
to bully Southern African countries to the Earth Summit in Johannesburg
to accept GM food and, but Zambia refused to be bullied. In India, the
U.S. Embassy tried to pressurize the Ministry of Environment through
the Prime Minister's office to clear imports of GM corn, but a major
mobilisation of women's groups organized as the National Alliance of
Women for Food Rights under the movement of Diverse Women for
Diversity, was successful in sending back two ship loads of 10,000 tons
of GM corn. Since then the Chairman of the Genetic Engineering Approval
Committee which rejected GM crops and imports has been removed and the
Agricultural Ministry has been changed.

Free people with free information are saying no to genetically
engineered food for both ecological and health reasons. However,
genetic engineering is being imposed on the world by a handful of
global corporations with the backing of one powerful government.

Commercial crops produced through genetic engineering are not producing
more food nor are they reducing the use of chemicals. While the hunger
argument is the most frequently used argument to promote and push
genetic engineering, GMOs have more to do with corporate hunger for
profits than poor people's hunger for food. As a news item in the
international Herald Tribune of May 29, 2003 titled, "Biotech war
recast as hunger issue" reported,

President George W. Bush is framing his attack on European resistance
to genetically modified crops as part of a campaign against world
hunger.

Bush and his aides are making an emotional plea, saying the
administration's stance is part of the fight against world hunger. In a
speech last week be accused Europe of hindering the "great cause of
ending hunger in Africa" with its ban genetically modified corps."
(IHT, May 29, 2003)

The technology of genetic engineering is not about overcoming food
scarcity but about creating monopolies over food and seed, the first
link in the chain and over life itself.

After having pressurized Lula's government in Brazil to temporarily
remove the ban on GMOs, Monsanto is now claiming royalties for genes in
the Round up Resistance Soya crops, showing once again that profits
through royalty collection are the real objective of spreading GM
crops.

India has been forced to change its patent laws under TRIPS and the
main beneficiary of the Second Amendment to India's Patent Act of 1970
are biotech corporations like Monsanto, seeking patents on genetically
engineered crops.

Patents also criminalise and make illegal the human work of life's
reproduction. When seeds are patented, farmers exercising their freedom
and performing their duty of saving and exchanging seeds are treated as
"intellectual property thieves". This can reach absurd limits as in the
case of Percy Schmieser whose canola field was polluted by Monsanto's
Round up Resistant Canola, and instead of Monsanto compensating Percy
for pollution on the "polluter pays principle", Monsanto sued him for
$200,000 for theft of their genes. Monsanto uses detective agencies and
police to track farmers and their crops. Patents imply police states.

Genetic engineering is not merely causing genetic pollution of
biodiversity and creating bio-imperialism, monopolies over life itself.
It is also causing knowledge pollution -- by undermining independent
science, and promoting pseudo science. It is leading to monopolies over
knowledge and information.

The victimisation of Dr. Arpad Putzai who showed the health risks of GM
potatoes and Dr. Ignacio Chapela who showed that corn had been
contaminated in its centre of diversity in Mexico are examples of the
intolerance of a corporate controlled scientific system for real
science.

The fabrication of the data by Monsanto on Bt. Cotton India is an
example of the promotion of an unnecessary, untested, hazardous
technology through pseudo science. While yields of GM cotton fell by
80% and farmers had losses of nearly Rs. 6,000/acre. Monsanto used
Martn Qaim (University of Bonn) and David Zilberman) University of
California, Berkeley) to publish an article in Science to claim that
yields of Bt. Cotton increased by 80%. Qaim and Zilberman published the
paper on the basis of data provided by Monsanto from Monsanto's trials
not on the basis of the harvest from farmers fields in the first year
of commercial planting.

The fabricated data that presents a failure of Bt. Cotton as a miracle
hides the fact that non-target insects and diseases increased 250-300%,
costs of seed were 300% more and quantity and quality of cotton was
low. This is why on April 25, 2003, the Genetic Engineering Approval
Committee (GEAC) of the Government of India did not give clearance to
Monsanto to sell Bt. Cotton seeds in Northern India.

The false claims of Monsanto were also proved with a total failure of
Hybrid maize in the state of Bihar and a black listing of the company
by the government.

In Rajasthan, Monsanto gave itself an award for miracle yields. While
the brochures claimed 50-90 Q/acre, farmers harvested only 7 Q/acre,
90% lower than the promise. Farmers of the Udaipur district of
Rajasthan have started a campaign to boycott Monsanto seeds.

Reports of these failures do not reach the international level because
Monsanto controls the media with its public relations spin, just as it
is attempting to control governments and science.

This is the context in which the Biotech Conference for Agriculture
Ministers in Sacremento, California, hosted by Ann Vanneman, the U.S.
Secretary for Agriculture is taking place. Ann Vanneman used to head
Agracetus, a subsidiary of Monsanto. The Brazilian Agriculture Ministry
is held captive by Monsanto. The removal of India's Agriculture
Minister, Ajit Singh, a few months before general elections is to
ensure that the threat to peasant survival under corporate control of
agriculture is not put high on the agenda and India's Agriculture
Ministry also comes under Monsanto/Cargill control. The first activity
in which the new Agriculture Minister Rajnath Singh participated was a
Global Seed Conference organised by the Biotech industry.

Sustainability and science are being sacrificed for a reckless
experiment with our biodiversity and food systems which is pushing
species and peasants to extinction. We need to re-imbed technology in
ecology and ethics to ensure that the full ecological and social costs
are taken into account.

What is at stake is the evolution of nature and survival of people, our
food sovereignty and food freedom, integrity of creation and our food
systems based on the evolutionary freedom of nature and democratic
freedoms of farmers and consumers. The choice before us is
bio-imperialism or bio-democracy. Will a few corporations have a
dictatorship over our governments, our knowledge and information, our
lives and all life on the planet or will we as members of the Earth
family liberate ourselves and all species from the prison of patents
and genetic engineering?

We need to reclaim our food freedom and food sovereignty.

Our movement in India seeks to defend our seed freedom (Bija Swaraj)
and food freedom (Anna Swaraj) by defending our rights, and refusing to
cooperate with immoral and unjust laws (Bija Satyagraha). We save and
share our seeds, we boycott corporate seeds, we are creating patent
free, chemical free, genetic engineering free zones of agriculture to
ensure our agriculture is free of corporate monopolies and chemical and
genetic pollution. Our bread is our freedom. Our freedom will ensure
our bread. And each of us has a duty to exercise bread freedm (Anna
Swaraj) -- for the sake of the earth, for all species, and for
ourselves and the generations to come.

I am not a liberal feminist in that I don't believe that women's liberation lies in opportunities to be more equal with men. But, for some reason, I find women being raunchy to be liberating in some strange, perverse way.

In 2003, the UN reported that for the first time in history, the number of environmental refugees had surpassed the number of political and war refugees.

I would argue that we need to start speaking of socio-environmental refugees, because who contributes to environmental instability, and who suffers, are most certainly linked to social, economic, and political factors.

Each year, millions of people the world over are driven to forced
displacement. From the Maldives to Brazil, and even closer to home,
here in Canada, the disturbing accounts of people who have been
uprooted are amazingly similar. The enormous pressure placed on rural
populations as a result of the degradation of their life-supporting
environment is driving them increasingly further from their way of
life. The Refugees of the Blue Planet sheds light on the
little-known plight of a category of individuals who are suffering the
repercussions of this reality: environmental refugees. They are
constantly growing in number and often have no legal status, even
though their right to a clean and sustainable environment has been
violated.

Women and the Economy, a project of the UN platform for action committee, provides an excellent synopsis of Marilyn Waring's work Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth:

Many people have heard the terms GDP and GNP thrown
around by political leaders and economists, and perhaps even people we relate to in our daily lives. Some of us may even use those words ourselves. GDP (or Gross Domestic Product) is probably the most commonly used economic indicator in our society. However, few of us know where this system originated. Feminist economist Marilyn Waring tells us that GDP and GNP come from a small calculation in the UN System of National Accounts (UNSNA). Waring's ground-breaking book Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth, first published in 1988, is devoted to demystifying the UNSNA. Why does Waring believe the structure of the UNSNA is so important to understand? She explains:

When international reports and writers refer to women as statistically or economically invisible, it is the UNSNA that has made it so. When it dawns on you that militarism and the destruction of the environment are recorded as growth, it is the UNSNA that has made it so. When you are seeking out the most vicious tools of colonisation, those that can obliterate a culture and a nation, a tribe or a people's value system, then rank the UNSNA among those tools. When you yearn for a breath of nature's fresh air or a glass of radioactive-free water, remember that the UNSNA says that both are worthless.

The UNSNA is the mechanism that has allowed women's work and much of the rest of life to be made invisible and subsequently ignored and deemed unimportant in measures of economic progress. In order to change this, women need to know how the system works.

One aspect of Waring's book that I find particularly interesting is her historical account of the the Gross Domestic Product or GDP. The GDP, according to Waring was invented during the Second World War by the British economists Gilbert, Stone, and Keynes. Given the task of determining whether the war was economically viable, they came to the conclusion that war could be good for the economy in that it would have a positive impact on the national growth rate. In fact, one of the papers, co-authored by Keynes and Stone, was titled 'The National Income Expenditure and How to Pay for the War'.

It is disturbing to think that economic measures which count war as productive, while discounting caring activities and subsistence agriculture, are guiding the global economy. These measures are used by such institutions as the World Bank and most countries have been encouraged to adopt these methods of measuring 'productive activity'.

Coincidentally, I viewed the recently released film Why We Fight right around the time I was reading Waring's book. The film makes a frighteningly strong case that war is fueled by the highly profitable military-industrial-complex. You can watch the trailer here.

These issues are too vast for me to cover in one blog post (at least, with my brain running at about 20% capacity with ongoing illness). But, I hope to have provided some food for thought. I'd love to hear people's thoughts on these issues.

I recently read The End of Poverty by Jeffery Sachs. Sachs is the economist behind Bono's Make Poverty History and One campaigns. End of Poverty makes for interesting reading; Sachs details his involvement in the economic planning and restructuring of various governments. While Sachs provides an interesting analysis of the conditions and factors which promote and undermine economic growth, he fails to address the problems of the so-called developed world. Referring throughout the book to the ladder of economic of development, Sachs argues that the poorest countries require debt cancellation and increased foreign aid to reach the "first rung" of the ladder. But, Sachs takes as some sort of magical given that all can eventually reach the top rung of this metaphorical ladder. Ironically, Sachs metaphor of the ladder demonstrates the outcome of capitalism: a stratified economic order. And with the rise of neo-liberalism, and related decline of distributive mechanisms, the ladder is becoming longer, and the the middle rungs have begun to erode. The economic order is increasingly polarized both within and between countries.

Activist Vandana Shiva takes a strong stance against development theory arguing that, "Poverty is a final state, not an initial state of an economic paradigm, which destroys ecological and social systems for maintaining life, health and sustenance of the planet and people." Shiva has criticized Sachs' understanding of and proposed solutions to end poverty:

The $50 billion of "aid" North to South is a tenth of $500 billion flow South to North as interest payments and other unjust mechanisms in the global economy imposed by World Bank, IMF. With privatization of essential services and an unfair globalisation imposed through W.T.O, the poor are being made poorer.

Indian peasants are loosing $26 billion annually just in falling farm prices because of dumping and trade liberalization. As a result of unfair, unjust globalisation, which is leading to corporate, take over of food and water. More than $5 trillion will be transferred from poor people to rich countries just for food and water. The poor are financing the rich. If we are serious about ending poverty, we have to be serious about ending the unjust and violent systems for wealth creation which create poverty by robbing the poor of their resources, livelihoods and incomes.

Jeffrey Sachs deliberately ignores this "taking", and only addresses "giving", which is a mere 0.1% of the "taking" by the North. Ending poverty is more a matter of taking less than giving an insignificant amount more. Making poverty history needs getting the history of poverty right And Sachs has got it completely wrong.

Related Activities:

Go see Bullshit - a documentary that follows activist Vandana Shiva over the course of two years. This film is being shown this Wednesday, September 20th, at The Uptown as part of the Arusha Centre's Action Film Series.